Issue 386

11^th January 2019

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Sometimes it’s best to get straight to the links, isn’t it? You might think it’s because I couldn’t think of anything to comment on this week, but you’d be … well … actually you’d be totally right. 😂

Happy Friday everyone!

Dave Verwer

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News

Interesting view from Orta Therox on the Swift Package Manager. The important point that you won’t get from the title is that he’s not advocating for it to be used for iOS projects, but for the tooling around your projects. Things like SwiftLint, SwiftFormat, Danger, Sourcery, etc…

I still wonder what the plan is for bringing the package manager to Xcode and iOS development. I know there will be one, but it’s mostly quiet from Cupertino on the subject. I was hopeful that we’d hear something at WWDC 2018, maybe this year? 🤞

Tools

What if recording a video from the iOS Simulator was as simple as taking a screenshot? Well if you use Alfred or Keyboard Maestro, along with this script from Alex Stevenson-Price, it can be!

By the way, there’s a built in keyboard shortcut for taking a screenshot from the iOS Simulator (⌘+S) just in case you didn’t know! I still regularly see people taking a standard macOS screenshot of the simulator. 👍

Code

Keyboard shortcuts are 🔥 in these days of the iPad Pro, right? So what about this library from Brian Donohue that takes any table or collection view and adds shortcuts for moving up and down cells, or pages and cell selection.

Peter Livesey with a good look at the various options you have for keeping an offline copy of data in your app. There’s also some great advice at the end of the article on how to use the reachability API.

I’m guilty of this! I’m pretty good at keeping classes to a single responsibility but I do love to use that word in my class names. Ben Sandofsky has some advice on how to avoid typing it. 😂

Apple are pushing IAPs and subscriptions are the future of making money on the App Store. I think we’re all on the same page there. It did strike me while reading this though, that this could be much simpler. 😂

Design

Is this the second article in two weeks from Linzi Berry that I have linked to? Well, yes it is! This week she tackles separating content with divider lines. This is really great writing about iOS design, something that we unfortunately don’t get enough of these days.

Business and Marketing

We need to be slightly cautious with this data as I couldn’t find much information about who participated in it, and people who would take the time to fill in a survey about their App Store purchasing habits certainly skew slightly from average App Store shopper. However, the results are still fascinating. Given the prominence of customer reviews in this survey, you’ll also want to read this article that was also published this week.

Up to Speed

A new section of John Sundell’s site focusing on the basics of iOS development. If you’re just getting up to speed with Swift development, dive in.

Sponsored Jobs

Pitch, a new company from the makers of Wunderlist, is looking for a Senior iOS Engineer to join our mobile team onsite in Berlin or remote.

And finally...

🙄